Shared Reviews and Your Share Score

Shared Reviews (SR) is a community-based product review site that shares monthly revenue with writers, and with members who vote for quality reviews. Anyone who has an opinion about products you own (that fit the category structure) may sign up and participate.

In April 2008, just a couple of months after its public launch, the creators of the site put into place a ranking system called Share Score (SS). This is sort of a ranking of community responsibility. It was created in response to community suggestions that the other quantified measurement, called "Rank," was not necessarily helpful to new writers looking for some leadership. Rank refers only to the total amount of money earned by a member. The way in which money was earned during the beta phase differed from the system in place now. Then you received a set amount of money for each review, and additional money from the work of people who signed up under you and wrote reviews.

Now that Shared Reviews is in full swing, although many of the top earners are still actively participating, there are a number of newer writers who are very good, very helpful, and very active in the community. And there was no way for them to be recognized for their efforts. It also is going to take quite a while for newer people to ever catch up to the top earners from the beta phase. So SS has helped to give active participants status.

Share Score is not a perfect system, at least in the eyes of many of us who write at Shared Reviews. Nevertheless, it is a good beginning, and is helpful in many ways. Here are some tips as to how it works, and how to improve and maintain your score.

Each person who joins SR begins with an SS of 50%. From there, fairly obviously) you can go as high as 100% or fall as low as 0%. In the range of 25% to 74% you will have two votes per month in each subcategory (pmps) to "spend." Remember that you can earn money by voting. From 75% to 94% you will have three votes, and from 95% to 100% you will have the maximum, four votes per month per subcategory. If you fall below 25% you will only have one vote pmps.

The administrators of the site have not wanted to divulge all of the aspects of how the SS works. They want to minimize attempts to game or abuse the system. What this has mostly done is simply to frustrate the people who really want to do well. Some of the things which affect the score have been built with a time delay so that we have no idea what it was that caused our scores to change at a particular moment. But over time, many of us have managed to figure out some of how the system works, in addition to the things which we have been publicly told.

So, sometimes mysterious changes in our SS occur. Of course we never care when it is upwards. But it can be maddening when it goes down and we have no idea why. This seems equivalent to punishing a dog for something long after the event. The dog never knows why it was scolded and so can't improve it's behavior, but only becomes wary. Nevertheless, that is the way things are at present.

We do know that although the SS displays only as a whole number that there are effects which are only in the range of a thousandth of a point. This was clearly stated by admin on June 15. And your displayed SS is always rounded down. So if you were at 75.001% and you lose 0.003, you will see 74%. Similarly, if you were at 94.750% and you gain 0.3 you will rise to 95%

Actions which affect your SS

Writing:
Writing new reviews is a very good way to increase your SS. Each new review is worth almost a full point. So usually you will see your score go up when you publish a new review. But we know that it can't be worth a full point because occasionally you will have to write two reviews to see a point increase.

Beginning in July 2008 each participant must write 8 reviews per month or they will see a decrease in their SS. We do not yet know how much of a decrease this requirement is going to cause.

Voting:
Voting for reviews is a way to increase your SS. However, there are things to keep in mind. You should wait for the review page to fully load before voting. There appears to be a timer (of unknown length) to try to insure that you are actually reading the review. Voting too fast will decrease your SS.

It is best to either leave a substantial comment, or don't leave one at all. Multiple short comments will begin to result in your SS decreasing. DO NOT USE THE WORD "voted" in your comment. You will see many such comments that do. These are all going to have to be manually stripped from the site at some point. Using the word "voted" in a comment will reduce your SS.

It is not clear how many votes you must place to gain a point. Some writers believe that the higher your score is the more votes it requires to gain a point.

Pay attention to what you are voting for. If you vote for a review that is in the wrong category it may be pulled later and you will lost at least a partial point for not paying attention when you voted. If you vote for reviews that are just plain spam, or offensive you will lose at least one SS point when they are pulled. Reviews that don't say much of anything, have exceptionally bad spelling or grammar may also be pulled. It is up to you to vote responsibly!

Sharing:
Inviting friends to join SR through the interface in your Community Tab is supposed to increase your SS.

Sending a review to someone through the interface on each review page is supposed to increase your SS.

Adding friends also increases your SS. But you might want to add friends with some discretion. At some SS level which we haven't yet determined, it lowers your score by a whole point if you send someone a friend request (by clicking on the little orange people holding hands on their profile page). When they accept you gain that point back. So, no harm, no foul as long as they accept. Thus you might want to send them a private message first. You might say, "I just read two of your reviews and I liked them. If you want to be my friend let me know and I'll send you a request." The more friends you have, the more people there are who will see your new reviews in their Community Tab.

We think that there is going to be a decrease in SS if you do not log in to the site for some extended length of time. So far, none of the most active people has been gone long enough to test how that is going to work.

Helping the Community Grow Responsibly:
You can increase your SS by reporting reviews which are problematic. However there is a great range of effects on the SS in play here.

On each review page there is a drop down list of reasons that you might report a review. These include: Duplicated Review, Offensive Content, Copied from Another Source, Wrong Category, Spam, and Not a Product Review. If the admin agrees that you have made a correct report there will be some increase in your SS. Finding plagiarized reviews, spam, and offensive stuff counts for more. Making incorrect reports will result in a loss of SS.

If you have a review that gets pulled or even sent back to you for editing you will lose SS. In fact, if you copied a review from somewhere else you will be immediately banned from the site. The severity of other offenses will determine the loss of SS, but we have no way of quantifying these exactly.

Also, if you have voted for a review that gets pulled you will lose SS. You will receive a notification and your vote in that category will be given back. There is also a range of effects here. If you voted for a review that was copied from somewhere else you don't lose much SS because it is unlikely that you might have recognized that. However, if you chose to vote for something that is obviously spam then you should expect to take a harder SS hit if it is pulled.

Currently the category structure is being evaluated for a complete revamping because it has some serious holes, and overlaps too. So we have been told that if you voted for a review that was in the wrong category you will not lose SS for that.

Conclusion:
There are now quite a few participants at Shared Reviews whose Share Score is in the 95-100% range. With a little persistence it is not too difficult to achieve that level. However, you need to remain active to maintain that score.

If you want to succeed at SR come into the forums, look for people with high SS and seek them out for advice.

This article is being published as Display Only so that it can be updated as needed. The information here is current as of June 23, 2008.

Shared Reviews